Paolo Angeli / RADE

Rade is an unexpected arrival, like a beam of sunlight during the rainy season. Paolo Angeli’s latest discographical synthesis comes a year after his critically-acclaimed album Jar’a. If the latter was a contemplation inside the most ancestral Sardinia, with Rade, the Sardinian musician changes course, openly confronting the Mediterranean in a navigation that takes us to the mixed race atmosphere of Mare Nostrum ‘s ports. The compositions come from utopic crossroads, dreamlike landscapes, sketched with a fountain pen, places sheltered from the storm’s fury, that recall illusions and mirage.The sea is magma that unites the latitudes of lands above sea level, music islands hanging between popular and contemporary, Balkan pulsations, middle-eastern arches, North African desert adagios, Rebetiko citations and memories of historical avant-gardes, flamenco reminiscences, dissonant phrasing, epic art-rock crescendo and patches of lyricism. The concept album sums up Paolo’s twenty-five years of life with his orchestra-guitar, pushed to the limit of its tonal and expressive potential. Paolo’s voice, however, is what weaves the narrative here. Nasal and with a Sardinian-Spanish flavor, relying on quatrains from 1700s and 1800s Sardinian poets from the regions of Gallura and Logudoro. The music in Rade emerges as a wreck stocked with memories, wrapped by a blinding light. The sea swell is a silver surface, the Sardinian singing blends and merges with sounds that evoke a secular prayer. Rade is aged must from the last century, that somebody forgot in a ship’s galley, leaving tannin marks on glasses, sinking into memories of ethereal visions, stiffened by the sea salt. The light of the Mediterranean Sea radiates into our houses with all the might of a Mediterranean avant-garde, passed on orally by a joyful Charon that imagines a sea that knows no boundaries, speaks a thousand languages for a brief moment and then throws them away. “… and timeless striped sweaters, once again renewing the ritual of listening to a record, the need for joy. The music in Rade emerges as a wreck stocked with memories, wrapped by a blinding light. The sea swell is a silver surface, the Sardinian singing blends and merges with sounds that evoke a secular prayer.